Blog

Contract Tests

February 1, 2023

One of my favorite awesome talks of all time is Integrated Tests Are a Scam by J.B. Rainsberger. I must admit that the title has a clickbait vibe to it. However, I very muc...

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The Testing Quadrant

June 15, 2022

Back in 2003, Brian Marick wrote an excellent article series about agile testing. There he described the concept of the Testing Quadrant. To my recollection this used to be a ...

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Ignoring Tests

June 22, 2021

Most test frameworks out there have the capability to disable tests. This is usually done by adding some kind of annotation that instructs the test runner to ignore an individu...

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Inside-Out and Outside-In TDD

June 16, 2020

Test-Driven Development is a discipline that exists for about two decades now. Unfortunately, to this very day, it is still not without controversy. Most professional developer...

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Test Double Heuristics

June 3, 2020

In the previous blog post, we’ve talked about avoiding excessive specification of test doubles. This is just one in a series of “good practices” for using test doubles in solit...

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Test Doubles

April 8, 2020

In the previous blog post, we’ve talked about indirect inputs and outputs when a unit test exercises a Subject Under Test. The examples shown previously demonstrate the use of ...

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Indirect Inputs and Outputs

April 1, 2020

Previously we discussed what state and behaviour verification is about. Depending on the nature of the production code that we’re designing, we might decide to apply one approa...

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Cascading Failures

March 18, 2020

In a previous blog post, we discussed the test pyramid and why it is a useful model to reason about a healthy mix of solitary and sociable tests. I mentioned that at t...

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The Test Pyramid

November 7, 2019

In the previous blog post, we touched on two different categories of automated tests, namely solitary and sociable tests. We also mentioned that in order to build maintainable ...

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A Taxonomy Of Tests

October 8, 2019

It’s more than fair to say that the terminology used in the world of automated tests can be a bit overwhelming. Software people have uncovered all sorts of tests in a wide vari...

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Fast Feedback

September 3, 2019

Test-Driven Development is a discipline that exists for almost two decades now. Unfortunately, to this very day, it is still not without controversy. Most professional developer...

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Debugability Considered Useful

January 3, 2019

Developers are lazy. There’s nothing new about that. We even pride ourselves on it. Sometimes being lazy is a good thing, but most of the time it’s not something we should brag ...

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Blaming Mocks For Bad Design

December 18, 2018

A while back I stumbled upon this talk titled Built-in Fake Objects. After I’ve watched the first 20 minutes or so, I was so worked up that I almost threw away my iPad just out ...

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All in the Name of DRY

September 25, 2018

A while back, I was doing a code review. At some point I encountered some constructs that I see quite often. While I was describing and building my case, I was thinking that I ...

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Product or Project Focused

October 24, 2015

A software development team in an organization should be able to focus on the core domain that reflects the business it’s serving. Developers on the team should be able to itera...

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Premature Abstraction

October 17, 2015

The first time I read the GoF book, I didn’t understand it. This was because I didn’t had a decent understanding of the principles of object-oriented programming at the time. A...

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Out of the Tar Pit

May 9, 2014

A while ago I read "Out of the tar pit", which is an excellent paper written by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks. In this paper, the authors discuss different types of complexity in ...

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Awesome talks

January 17, 2014

There are a lot of screencasts, recordings of user group gatherings and conference talks available online. I try to commit myself watching at least two new talks every week, and...

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Clojure Kata #1 – Fizz Buzz

December 19, 2013

I’ve been learning more about the ins and outs of Clojure lately, so I decided to practice a couple of katas. The obvious first one is the Fizz Buzz kata. Here’s the code of m...

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Either.js

December 5, 2013

Some time ago, I was watching this excellent video course by Neal Ford titled “Functional Thinking – Functional Programming using Java, Clojure and Scala”. In one of the modules...

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Byte Magazine Archives

July 26, 2013

Earlier this week I accidentally stumbled on archive.org where they are hosting an extensive backlog of old issues of Byte magazine. This magazine was an American microcomputer ...

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Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

July 19, 2013

A while ago, I was thinking about which programming language I wanted to learn next. At first I was doubting between Scala, Ruby or perhaps Clojure. But I couldn’t reall...

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Taking Baby Steps with ScriptCS

May 31, 2013

I’ve been following the ScriptCS project with great interest over the last couple of months. As you may know by now, I’ve been searching for a more lightweight .NET development ...

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Introducing node-validation

May 3, 2013

Some time ago I was looking for a validation library/module for use in a small Express application that I was writing at the time. I couldn’t find anything that suited my taste ...

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Visual Studio Light Edition

November 30, 2012

I noticed this blog post from Scott Hanselman the other day about Visual Studio Express 2012 for Windows Desktop. This post included a screenshot from the installation program. ...

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Blitz

July 24, 2012

The last couple of weeks I’ve been playing with a load testing tool called Blitz. You can create a free account which provides you the ability to ‘rush’ your web application wit...

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Book Review: Just for Fun

February 28, 2012

A while ago, my colleague Wouter recommended this book titled Just for Fun – The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary written by Linus Torvalds. The author ...

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View Collation in CouchDB

February 14, 2012

A couple of weeks ago I learned about a very neat feature of CouchDB called view collations. Basically, view collations enables us to make joins between documents. Let’s look at...

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Introducing TrackMyRun

January 24, 2012

I’ve been working on a small pet project for a couple of weeks now, which I named TrackMyRun. I’m quite fanatic when it comes to running, doing about 130 runs a year. Currently ...

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The Cathedral and the Bazaar

October 14, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I ran into this website from Eric S. Raymond, the author of the book The Cathedral and the Bazaar. There’s a recording of a great presentation...

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An Observation about TDD

September 9, 2011

To me, developers that are not applying TDD practices during their day-to-day job always seem more in a hurry than developers that do apply red-green-refactor. In their hurry, t...

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Book Review: The Clean Coder

September 6, 2011

Earlier this week I finished reading Uncle Bob’s latest book The Clean Coder. Robert C. Martin is a great writer and I very much enjoyed reading his previous boo...

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Dynamic in C# is Broken

August 11, 2011

Earlier this week, I ran into an issue while using the dynamic keyword in C#. I learned from C# in Depth that there are a couple of restrictions with dynamic, most notably when ...

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Book Review: Hands-on Node.js

June 28, 2011

Last week, I finished reading Hands-on Node.js written by Pedro Teixeira. I very much enjoyed reading this concise introduction to Node.js, and although it’s targeted towards be...

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A Quartet of Book Reviews

May 27, 2011

Since a couple of months or so, the amount of time spent for my daily commute to and from work nearly tripled. I also decided to travel by train instead of using my car ...

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The Social Network

January 10, 2011

Over the weekend I watched this movie called The Social Network. As a geek, I felt that I was somehow mentally obligated to see this movie :-). While I was watching this movie, ...

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A Burden Called Meetings

December 9, 2010

I’ve been working for an enterprise corporation for 5+ years, which I’m going to be leaving soon. This organization is suffering from a wide-spread malady called “meetingiti...

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AutoTest.NET

November 30, 2010

I just want to quickly point out a tool that I’ve been playing with for a couple of days now, named AutoTest.NET. Its an open-source tool that originates from a popular tool in ...

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Basic JavaScript Part 2 : Objects

November 13, 2010

In a previous blog post, I showed some of the rich capabilities of functions in JavaScript. For this post I want to have a brief look at objects in JavaScript. Let’s start with ...

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Code Retreat Ghent

November 8, 2010

Last Saturday I got up very early in the morning so I could spend the whole day at the Code Retreat in Ghent. This Code Retreat was organized by AGILEMinds and facilitated by Co...

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Laborers versus Professionals

October 27, 2010

A while ago, my good friend Michel Grootjans tweeted the following: Are developers (a) laborers or (b) professionals? If (a) don't expect them to think. If (b) don't expect the...

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Book Review: Debug It!

August 18, 2010

Throughout my career as a professional software developer,   I’ve spent quite a lot of my learning time to sharpen my debugging skills. I’ve always considered this as on...

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Behaviors with MSpec

February 26, 2010

In my previous posts, I showed the syntax for context/specifications using Machine.Specifications (or MSpec for short) and how to use an auto mocking container in conjunction wi...

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MSpec and Auto Mocking

February 23, 2010

In my previous post, I explained how to get started with Machine.Specifications (or MSpec for short) and showed you how the syntax for context/specifications looks like when usi...

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JetBrains Web IDE

January 29, 2010

As I already mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m kind of (re-)learning HTML and CSS. The best way for me to pick things up again is by getting my hands dirty and work myself ...

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Calling Non-Public Methods

January 28, 2010

A typical way for invoking a non-public method of a class is by using reflection. This can come in handy in a number of cases. One typical scenario that comes to mind is when th...

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CSS Basics: The Box Model

January 26, 2010

If you’ve been using CSS for a while, then this post will probably teach you nothing new. I just wanted to state the obvious even if I’m the only one who benefits from it. Whil...

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Review Amazon Kindle DX

November 20, 2009

As my bookshelf has grown out of proportion over the last years, I basically had two options left. First option was to build an extra room onto my house that could serve as a pr...

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Exploring NServiceBus

October 9, 2009

I've been learning a bit more about Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Event-Drive Architecture (EDA) over the last couple of months. Something that kept coming back in the...

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Fluent Domain Methods

August 1, 2009

In my last post, I talked about a Generic Expression Builder class for easily creating domain entities through expression builders. This generic base class takes away some of th...

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Generic Expression Builder

July 25, 2009

I blogged about fluent interfaces and expression builders a couple of times before. For this post, I want to share a base class that I've been using for taking away some of the ...

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Views into CouchDB

July 10, 2009

To start off, here are the links to my previous posts about CouchDB: Relaxing on the Couch(DB) Installing the Couch(DB) PUTting the Couch(DB) in Your Living Room ...

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Generic Value Object

June 7, 2009

I just wanted to share my attempt for implementing a generic base class for Value Objects, popularized by Eric Evans and the Domain-Driven Design community. I must say that I go...

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Installing the Couch(DB)

May 30, 2009

In my previous post, I talked about some introductory topics regarding CouchDB. In this post I want to walk you through some of the hurdles you need to take when you want to ins...

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Relaxing on the Couch(DB)

May 24, 2009

The last couple of months, I heard some buzz around CouchDB at several user groups. Listening to this podcast really got me interested, so I decided to learn more about it in or...

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Conditional Using

April 9, 2009

Today I found myself writing the following code: private void DoSomething(String userName) { using(var userEntry = GetUserEntryFor(userName)) if(CouldBeFound(userEn...

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Progressive Interfaces

March 21, 2009

David wrote this post about a month ago where he challenged the usefulness of fluent interfaces. One of his concerns is the discoverability of a fluent API in order to determine...

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How Do I Learn

March 7, 2009

You may have noticed that I didn't get around to write that many blog posts over the last two months. While some of you may regret this, others would argue that the universe has...

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Book review: LINQ in Action

February 23, 2009

Yesterday I stopped reading LINQ in Action after I read just the first two parts about LINQ to Objects and the last part about building your own LINQ provider. Although ...

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My 100th blog post for 2008

December 31, 2008

I'm just in time for my 100th blog post for this year. As I mentioned last year, I think this is my absolute ceiling when it comes to writing blog posts, but you'll never know. ...

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Hello Real DDD World

December 31, 2008

I'm really looking forward to the next Dutch ALT.NET meeting where Yves Goeleven will discuss DDD practices while having a look at a real production application. I think we'll h...

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Hello LINQ in .NET 2.0

December 31, 2008

When using Visual Studio 2008, it is possible to use most of the new language additions of C# 3.0 in a .NET 2.0 project. This because the C# 3.0 compiler is used for both .NET 2...

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Learning about StructureMap

December 12, 2008

I’ve been playing around with StructureMap for the last couple of days and I must say that I’m really impressed. I had no troubles in quickly getting up to speed with this amazi...

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Type Analyzing Blogs

December 2, 2008

Ayende blogged about this web site which you can use to analyze the text on your blog (and those of others). It makes some guesses about the personality of the person(s) that wr...

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Marick's Law

November 29, 2008

This delightful post from Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin describes with much better sentences what I was trying to express with my latest post Professional Under Pressure. When ...

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Professional Under Pressure

November 27, 2008

A first delivery of our current project is going into production very soon. The team has worked hard and is still working very hard to straighten out the last issues. As with ev...

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How TFS Lost my Trust

November 26, 2008

This morning, I spent the first 30 minutes of my day figuring out why the CI build failed after I checked in some changes to the code. No big deal, right? I just messed up. Tur...

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Book Review : Beyond Code

November 10, 2008

I read Beyond Code during my flight to Austin for the Kaizenconf. It was a quite enjoyable book that focuses on how to distinguish yourself as a software developer. As you may ...

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Kaizenconf Part 2 - Open Space

November 5, 2008

After the pre-conference workshops, it was finally time to kick-off the open-space conference itself. Before Steven "Doc" List held his opening speech, Oren and Glenn couldn't w...

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Attending the Kaizenconf

October 30, 2008

Peter and yours truly arrived at Austin yesterday for attending the Kaizenconf. I've been really looking forward to this. Hope to meet you there. If you see two goofy European g...

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Book Review: C# in Depth

October 20, 2008

I just finished reading C# in Depth: What you need to master C# 2 and 3. Although the book is only 358 pages, it's title is certainly not exaggerated. It feels like I've...

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Sins of Commissions

October 12, 2008

Reading Joel Spolsky's latest article, Sins of Commissions, reminded me about a topic that I feel very strongly about, namely incentives for software developers based on some ki...

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Book Review: Clean Code

October 2, 2008

I just finished reading the magnificent book Clean Code - A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship. I must say, if I would have a software company of my own, then I would forc...

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Little Secret

September 24, 2008

I'll let you in on a little secret. The key to writing good comments is ... (rolling the drums) ... not writing them at all! Let me elaborate on that. To me, there are two kinds...

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Ventilation of Thoughts

September 7, 2008

Earlier this week I went back to work after a refreshing (and very much needed) vacation. During this past week I participated in some interesting discussions that made me think...

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Decoupled Domain Models

August 26, 2008

On the DDD user group, there has been endless discussions about whether a service or repository can be directly called by classes that are part of the domain model. There is a g...

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NHibernate 2.0 went gold!

August 25, 2008

Yesterday I got back from a refreshing holiday in Italy. First thing I noticed after opening my RSS reader was that NHibernate 2.0 got released. Aah, life couldn't get any bette...

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My New Home Developer Rig

August 15, 2008

I finally got my new desktop up-and-running and fully installed. Last weekend, me and my dear colleague Sven Erkens (kudos!) assembled the different parts to what became a lean,...

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The Onion Architecture

July 29, 2008

This is what I consider to be a good architecture for long-lived business applications and how I like to design them. Actually, our current and past two projects apply this desi...

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It's the little things

July 17, 2008

A while ago, I wrote a blog post regarding Test Data Builders Refined. Earlier this week, I wrote a very simple base class that provides an implicit cast operator for the builde...

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Dutch ALT.NET User Group

July 4, 2008

Yesterday, me, myself and Peter went to the first Dutch ALT.NET gathering. Besides being stuck in traffic for more than an hour, I had a great time. There were some great conver...

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Active Conventions with NDepend

June 28, 2008

Some time ago Patrick Smacchia wrote a nice article on his blog about active conventions on your code base. I thought I tried this for myself and made up some interesting CQL qu...

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The Future of .NET

June 2, 2008

That's the title of the latest .NET Rocks episode. No big deal, just one of the better podcast episodes out there. Microsoft, are you listening? Maybe you should put your chairm...

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Peter works on the web!

May 27, 2008

It seems that I managed to convince another one of my dear colleagues to start blogging (if my children thaught me one thing, it's that constant whining actually works!). Peter ...

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I'm on ...

May 21, 2008

... Twitter. Why? Because all the cool kids are doing it ;-) (yep, I have no spine). Let's see where this goes.

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WCF friction

May 13, 2008

Today I spent some time (thank God no more than 15 minutes) tracking down a WCF issue from hell. Every time I made a call to the service I got the following exception: System.Se...

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On Persistence

May 1, 2008

Earlier this week, I managed to convince our very wise decision makers to start using NHibernate for our persistence layer. My team mate on the project describes how it went. Wh...

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Test Data Builders Refined

April 26, 2008

Last year, I blogged about Test Data Builders here and here. I still use them heavily in my unit tests for creating objects with test data. Heck, I also use this pattern for flu...

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On Windows Workflow and Biztalk

April 4, 2008

From each of these technologies I have a book laying around on my bookshelf somewhere. For WF, I have bought Essential Windows Workflow Foundation about 1 year ago. Since then, ...

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I'm on Elegant Code

April 1, 2008

David Starr from Elegant Code asked me whether I wanted to join his blogging group and I accepted. From now on, I will be the first European Elegant Code blogger. I want to than...

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I've won!

March 30, 2008

The Elegant Code Essay contest that is. I just won a free copy of Beautiful Code. You can read my essay here. Many thanks to the nice people of Elegant Code.

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Castle Dynamic Proxy

March 30, 2008

This blog has been silent for a while, and for good reason. Besides experiencing symptoms of writer's block,  I've also been playing around with a lot of new stuff (at least new...

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Daily Stand-up Meetings

March 2, 2008

I finished reading the excellent article It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings written by Jason Yip. Somewhere in the beginning of this article, the aut...

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On Software Factories

February 23, 2008

Bart Waeterschoot is blogging on IntoFactories.NET. I'm glad he joined the blogosphere. Bart is a very smart guy and I'm looking forward to more of his writing. Nonetheless, I h...

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From Space Shuttle to Software

February 21, 2008

This article, Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering, really struck a nerve. It's very well written and well thought out. I'll jump right to the conc...

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DirectoryEntry Close vs Dispose

February 19, 2008

While I was reading The .NET Developer's Guide to Directory Services Programming yesterday, I came across this passage called Close or Dispose? There's a class called DirectoryE...

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Treat Warnings as Errors

February 7, 2008

This in one of my pet peeves. Its simply none negotiable! I still don't understand why it can be turned off. Heck, I don't understand why its not turned on by default. I ...

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Code Coverage with TeamCity

January 25, 2008

In my previous post on JetBrains TeamCity I mentioned that it has no support for .NET code coverage.  With this post I want to correct the injustice of this statement. It was a ...

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AutoMocking Container

January 13, 2008

When writing unit tests that involve interaction based testing, you most likely end up using one of the mocking frameworks out there. The mocking framework I'm using is Rhino Mo...

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Total Commander Rocks!

January 8, 2008

I'm a huge fan of Total Commander for as long as I can remember. Thinking about it, I'm using it for more than 10 years now. Today, I accidentally discovered a very nice feature...

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Test Data Builder

December 23, 2007

A while ago, I blogged about using Test Data Builders as opposed to the Object Mother pattern. Here are some links to additional tips and tricks: Tricks with Test Data Builders...

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Why O Why - The Day after

December 2, 2007

Alex Henderson picked up on my "Why O Why" post in his take on the Pluggable IoC in WPF Composite & Enterprise Library v.Next. I still believe that an IoC Application Block...

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Why O Why

December 1, 2007

Glenn Block announced on the ALT.NET Yahoo Group that the P&P team is developing a new dependency injection framework. To say it with the words of Captain Alberto Bertorelli...

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Design and Evolution of C++

November 29, 2007

Driving home from work, I listened to this podcast on the Design and Evolution of C++. Somewhere half way through, Ted Neward mentions the new thread library in C++0x. I found H...

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Design by Contract - The Sequel

November 20, 2007

In this post I put out some code for checking method arguments. I changed it somewhat regarding value  types:public void DoSomethingMeaningfull(Int32 someNumber) { // Throws Ar...

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Design by contract

October 24, 2007

Something that was bothering me for a while now was writing the following piece of code over and over again: public void DoSomething(Request request) { if(null == request) ...

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Article on Dependency Injection

September 29, 2007

Mark Monster has written an excellent article on Dependency Injection in the newest .NET Magazine (it's no MSDN magazine, but hey, its free of charge). Nonetheless, there are tw...

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Bug Driven Development

September 24, 2007

Are you doing Test-Driven Development or Bug Driven Development? From my experiences, test-driven development seems to slow you down at the beginning of a project. This isn't en...

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A day of great quotes

September 10, 2007

Scott Bellware: I think that the difference between a good developer and an excellent developer is the excellent developer's willingness to not know, an openness to explore, and...

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Community efforts

September 1, 2007

I'm with Scott on this one. The fact that Microsoft duplicates the efforts of their own community is simply inexcusable. Why does this bother me? Using the best tool or library ...

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Discipline

August 15, 2007

Another must-read post by Jeff Atwood on how Discipline Makes Strong Developers. I couldn't agree more. Only discipline on the part of the developers makes code that is concise ...

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Me like CruiseControl.NET

July 29, 2007

One of the things I've picked up from the big book of developer tools is CruiseControl.NET aka CC.NET. CC.NET is a continuous integration system that automates the entire build,...

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I Hate SSIS

July 24, 2007

Check out the I Hate SSIS page on the Ayende's wiki. SSIS stands for SQL Server Integration Services. I've never worked with it before (I have little experience with DTS), but I...

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Dynamic Language Runtime

July 22, 2007

Earlier this week, I've been listening to the .NET Rocks podcast, John Lam on the DLR. I must admit, I'm looking forward to IronRuby. Now, somewhere half way the show, Carl Fra...

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Agile Team Dynamics

July 10, 2007

If you're interested on agile development, this blog post on Agile Team Dynamics is a must-read. I especially like the idea of banning e-mails for inter-team communication.

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FCL Type Names

July 8, 2007

After a code review session earlier this week, I was wondering if I am the only one who uses the FCL type names (e.g. Int32) instead of their language-agnostic counterparts (e.g...

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How to read a book

June 25, 2007

Charles Petzold gives some great advice at how to read a book. He mentions some of the tips 'n tricks I already learned over the past couple of years: Don't get distracted in ...

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ALT.NET - Summary

June 5, 2007

Great summary on being ALT.NET. I don't completely agree with the hot-or-not list of Roy, therefore I like the modified list of Sam much more. My goal in life is to be ALT.NET a...

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Persistence Ignorance. Finally!

June 5, 2007

Daniel Simmons, talks about persistence ignorance and how it will be incorporated in next version(s) of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. In a previous post, I already mentioned the...

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My advice to Jamie

May 31, 2007

It seems that Microsoft is not pleased with the fact that my favorite VS add-in offers support for the VS Express SKU. You can read all about it in this post from Jamie Cansdale...

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You're not alone

May 30, 2007

It seems that Jimmy Nilsson also has a lot of trouble with ASP.NET. As you know (or might not know), I'm not enjoying my experiences with ASP.NET either. Enough with the ASP.NET...

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Resharper dude

May 21, 2007

Over the weekend I watched this screen cast from Oren Eini. You should have a look at it, even if you're completely not interested in mocking frameworks. The best commercial of ...

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NUnit vs Team System Unit Test

May 15, 2007

At work there's a discussion going on whether we will choose NUnit or Team System Unit Test for our unit tests. Currently we have about 1000+ unit tests written in NUnit and we ...

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Agile is just human nature

May 12, 2007

I just finished reading a book written by Phillip Khan-Panni, and its not about any of the latest cool technologies or methodologies, but about efficient communication between u...

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A Browser Tale

May 7, 2007

I'm a big fan of the Opera web browser for many years now. I like it because it's the underdog. They don't have the same market share as IE and Firefox, but I find it the most i...

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ALT.NET

May 4, 2007

After reading this post from David Laribee, I promptly put the four criteria to be an ALT.NET developer on our team portal. 1/ You’re the type of developer who uses what work...

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NUnit 2.4 constraints

April 13, 2007

The forthcoming release of NUnit 2.4 supports a constraint-based syntax for assertions. Don't worry, the old syntax (classic model) is still going to be available for a long tim...

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Build a solid core

April 8, 2007

Essential reading from Jean-Paul S. Boodhoo about building a solid core. This post contains a number of truths that I want to point out. Many developers need to spend more time...

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Developer & IT Pro Days 2007

March 30, 2007

Great sessions and content on the Developer & IT Pro Days 2007. The following sessions where my favorites: WCF communication patterns: more than request-reply and Beyond ABC...

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Persistence Ignorance

March 15, 2007

The blogosphere is full with posts about how the ADO.NET Entity Framework is violating Persistence Ignorance by letting domain classes inherit from an abstract base class in ord...

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Domain-Driven Design

March 7, 2007

I'm so much into Domain-Driven Design! I already read Applying Domain-Driven Design and Patterns and I just finished reading Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Compl...

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A lean mean blogging machine

March 6, 2007

I'm convinced that this guy does not sleep at night (or his time management must be awesome). He does so many blog posts a day, he must be a cyborg of some sort ;-) or is he a t...

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What's Wrong with ASP.NET (bis)

February 3, 2007

Another perspective from Steve Eichert. He claims that developers are not leaving .NET because of what Rails is doing right, but instead because of what .NET is doing wrong. Per...

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Once Upon a Team

January 31, 2007

Great follow-up by Jeremy D. Miller for The Anti Team. You can find this blog post here. You should give it a good read! Good teams challenge their approach every single day and...

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What's wrong with ASP.NET

January 30, 2007

While I was doing the dishes today, I was thinking about the programming model of ASP.NET and the fact that I don't like it (just as don't like doing the dishes). The model it u...

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Maintainable code

January 26, 2007

A very nice post by Uncle Bob about rapid software development. We've all done it! Pulling together those quick & dirty hacks in order to meet our deadline. We've created so...

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The Anti Team

January 22, 2007

Another great manifest by Jeremy D. Miller, called The Anti Team. Especially the first one is a very recognizable team role and especially the one I hate most: the non-coding ar...

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NDoc 2.0 Alpha vs Sandcastle

January 19, 2007

I just finished reading Kiwidude's rant about using Sandcastle to generate documentation for .NET 2.0 applications and libraries. I'm using it for a couple of months now and I m...

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VMware Workstation 6.0 Beta

December 23, 2006

It's simply the best, better than all the rest: VMware Workstation 6.0 beta can be downloaded here. Besides support for Windows Vista and multiple monitor display, VMware Workst...

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System.Configuration 2.0

December 15, 2006

Today I was working my way through migrating a web service application from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. One of the things that I came across was the new architecture of the System.Con...

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WCF Coding Standard

December 5, 2006

While the blogosphere is full of the first CTP of WPF/E, I'm want to mention something about an old technology, namely WCF. The nice people of IDesign already published their C#...

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To test or ... to test?

October 7, 2006

I recently came across the .NET Mock Objects project. This framework supplies mock implementations of the ADO.NET generic interfaces like IDataReader, IDbConnection, etc. (curre...

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Threading support from Microsoft

September 1, 2006

I just read an introductionary article about LINQ. There are some things that I like and there are some things that I don't like. Big deal, you would say: get on with your life!...

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I Hate Visual SourceSafe

August 16, 2006

Jeff Atwood’s latest post is very clear on this matter: Visual SourceSafe is absolute crap. Here a some quotes: If you are serious about the practice of software developmen...

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What's new in System.Xml 2.0?

August 6, 2006

The September 2006 issue of MSDN magazine has a great article about the new features in System.Xml 2.0. I used (and I am still using) this part of the .NET Framework a lot and h...

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Management and Engineers

April 30, 2006

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a fr...

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Debug.Assert in ASP.NET 2.0

January 14, 2006

Finally, finally, finally, … Debug.Assert now works with ASP.NET 2.0. You have to love those little improvements they did for .NET 2.0. When using version 1.1 of the .NET framew...

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Start

August 21, 2005

Een memorabele dag vandaag: mijn allereerste blog! Ik zal hier een varieteit aan onderwerpen ‘bloggen’ maar hoofdzakelijk over software ontwikkeling allerhande. Deze postings za...

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About

Thank you for visiting my website. I’m a professional software developer since Y2K. A blogger since Y2K+5. Author of Writing Maintainable Unit Tests. Provider of training and coaching in XP practices. Curator of the Awesome Talks list. Thinking and learning about all kinds of technologies since forever.

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(+32) 496 38 00 82

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